US Politics - A Society in Meltdown

Current Affairs
2311

Genocide and oppression are hardly unique to white people. Was Dafur committed by white people?, Rwanda? Cambodia? Bangladesh? The Chinese Great Leap forward where estimates range from 20 million dead to 45 million dead? The barbarity of Japan during WWII? If you could take your self loathing blinkers off I think you’ll agree genocide isn’t exclusively a “white” thing, it’s a human thing.

I see your knowledge of WWII history is as poor as US history. The Nazis under Hitler went to war not to defend racism but to restore Germany as a European superpower (after it had been crushed economically by Britain and France after WWI) and they exterminated anyone who stood in their way. Read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s target was eastern Europe “when we speak of new land in Europe today, we must principally bear in mind Russia and the states subject to her. Destiny itself seems to wish to point the way for us here”.

For now the third time but we know you are slow, my issue on Kelly is the morons who argue the North went to war on the moral issue of slavery. The North went to war to preserve the Union, many northerners were slave owners themselves, indeed Lincoln himself said “I have no purpose to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists”, and when Emancipation was declared in 1863, slavery was left intact in states that had not seceded. The North at the time was just as racist as the South (as evidenced in their treatment of native Americans), the difference is the South were more reliant on slavery for their cotton economy.

As I said, your hatred for the US blinds you to every other human evil perpetrated by every race in history.

3 Likes
2312

Are you disputing that the worst genocide and oppression has been committed by white people?

Which majority white countries haven’t been involved in committing genocide or oppressing peoples? Short enough list, I would have thought.

How did Germany “wish to restore itself as a European superpower”?

By asserting the primacy of Aryan whiteness and the racial superiority and purity of the “Germanic peoples”.

Why the fuck would I want to read that?

Have you even read Kelly’s comments? Do you even know what you’re arguing about?

You claim to not defend them, but yet keep defending them.

And now you’re again disputing that the civil war was fought over slavery.

I think your real problem was the tweet by a black man that I placed after Kelly’s comments.

You don’t like it when a black person tells a few truths, do you?

The inhabitants of the same states that fought to uphold slavery were lynching blacks up to the 1960s.

But apparently Mr. Kelly thinks they weren’t “compromised” with enough.

What is the real agenda with your continual mitigation and aplogism for the Confederacy?

In your previous post, you compared the USA to the Nazis, mate. :grin: But comparing the Confederacy to the Nazis despite the very obvious similarities is apparently ridiculous.

Your hatred for me and your utterly obsessive hatred for anything “liberal” (despite living in a country which claims to be the most liberal in the world) blinds you to reality. Youv’e clearly taken the words of your clown president to heart: “hate is what we need”.

2313

As always your default position when you are beaten in debate and cannot ever admit defeat is to label anyone who disagrees with you a racist or an apologist for racism, or a sexist or apologist for sexism. If you don’t mind I don’t need a lecture on morality from the sickest asshole on this site. Someone who has found humor in fantasizing having sex with Tony Keady’s widow when the woman and her family were in mourning, someone who labels other posters pedophiles even though you are the only one on here defending lenient sentencing for actual pedophiles, someone in other words with the moral compass of a sewer rat.

What country of any majority race hasn’t been involved in committing genocide and oppressing people? You demonstrate a n incredible ignorance of human history, and of race for that matter. As someone who has studied journalism, you are clearly able to write well, but your ability to apply critical thinking lets you down. Anyone with a functioning brain can see that I am not defending what Kelly said, but arguing against those who present the US civil war issues through the lens of today’s political climate. The Civil war could certainly have been averted if the Confederacy compromised and agreed that slavery should not be extended beyond existing states, as neither side at that time were advocating ending slavery. It was by the way your hated Republican party who were on the right moral side of the argument of at least trying to limit the spread of slavery.

Why would you want to read Mein Kampf? Maybe to educate yourself a little so you don’t continue to embarrass yourself with your shallow understanding of human history. But you won’t as in your undeveloped brain you truly believe you know everything, even though you actually know fuck all.

2314

I love the way the you continually refer to “having won the debate” or that I “have been beaten” in it. It’s almost like you’re trying to convince yourself of something you know perfectly well is nonsense. Cognitive dissonance, it’s called. A bit like how you do with politics in general.

I tell home truths, pal.

The home truth in this case being that it’s very difficult to avoid the conclusion that your world view is strongly informed by racism and racists, given your views on a number of topics, not least on Trump, on Charlottesville, on the NFL protests, on Black Lives Matter, on the civil war, on immigration, on Muslims, on Ibrahim Halawa, and I’m sure a range of other topics we’ve discussed that I can’t remember.

:smile:

Oh dear. you really have lost it.

If you knew anything about human history you’d know that whites have responsible for the worst genocides and oppression in human history.

You launched into a rant based on me putting up two tweets. One was a link to comments by John Kelly that “failure to compromise was the cause of the civil war”. The other one was by a black gentleman named Wendell Pierce objecting in strong terms to those comments.

Why did you launch into your unfocussed tirade if you didn’t agree with Kelly’s comments or the rebuttal from Mr. Pierce?

The only possible reasons could be that you either agreed with Mr. Kelly’s comments and/or disagreed with Mr. Pierce’s entirely appropriate rebuttal.

You’ve gone out of your way in this discussion to see the Union side in the civil war through today’s political lens, given that you have compared them to Nazis.

Yet you’ve been very keen to avoid doing that as regards the Confederate side.

One doesn’t even have to see the Confederate side through the political lens of today, even viewing them through the political lens and norms of the time reveals them as fighting to uphold an absolute evil.

The Union side actually ended slavery. I think you’ll find that was a very good thing.

The problem was that after the war they compromised yet again with the south, and white supremacism became the de facto ideology of the USA, something that wasn’t officially abolished for another hundred years.

And it’s still the unofficial ideology of much of the white population of that country, not lest the current president and Mr. Kelly, who are going a considerable way down the road of making it the official ideology once again.

Well, duh. But we all know the Republicans and the Democrats swapped sides many decades ago, a process which was effectively completed with the Civil Rights Act.

Today’s Republican party are the ones who are trying to turn the clock back to the days of white supremacism.

I’m already well acquainted with what the ideology of the Nazis was, thanks very much.

I already have enough on my plate having to listen to one shallow, moronic, racist demagogue without reading the words of another.

2315

The Chinese great leap was fairly fucked up. when put in context with the genocide in Ireland, 6 % of the Chinese died, 12% of us.

2316

Soon it’ll be a case of “in prison like Flynn”.

2317

I guess he just forgot.

2318

Good interview here with a former right-wing talk radio host who talks about how right-wing media in the US has descended into insanity.

"A giant fog machine": how right-wing media obscures Mueller and other inconvenient stories

A former right-wing radio host explains how conservative media became a “safe space.”

The news that special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort ought to dominate headlines in every corner of the media world.

But if the past week or so is any indication, conservative media is likely to spend most of its bandwidth covering a fake conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of our uranium as secretary of state.

President Trump called the bogus Clinton uranium deal a “modern-day Watergate.” A few days later, FoxNews.com amplified Trump’s charge in an article with the headline “Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russian uranium deal largely ignored by anti-Trump media, and other media disasters.”

The conspiracy is false, but that’s not really the point. The point is to muddy the waters, to divert attention from actual scandals. This is something conservative media is uniquely good at. The question is, why? Why is conservative media so much better than liberal media when it comes to making its preferred narratives stick?

To answer this question, I reached out Charlie Sykes, a leading conservative radio host in Wisconsin for nearly three decades. A vocal critic of Trump, Sykes eventually walked away from his show after alienating some of his pro-Trump listeners.

I asked Sykes, the author of the 2017 book How the Right Lost Its Mind, how right-leaning media is able to construct alternate realities for its base, and why it succeeds in ways liberal media does not.

“The conservative media has done a really great job of convincing conservatives that they’re under siege,” he told me. As a result, “the conservative media has become a safe space for people who want to be told that they don’t have to believe anything that’s uncomfortable or negative.”

Our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

Sean Illing
Obviously the news Monday was bad — for Manafort, for Trump, for the Republican Party. But will any of it matter to Republican voters?

Charlie Sykes
Well, we’ve been asking that for the last year and a half. How many times have we thought, “Well, this is going to be the breaking point.” So far, I think the answer is no. But also, I think what you saw is how serious this investigation is, how deep they’re going to go, and the possibility that they may come up with lots of stuff that we did not anticipate. There’s still a question mark there, I suppose.

But look, the conservatives’ resistance to negative information is truly awesome.

Sean Illing
Is that protective bubble impenetrable?

Charlie Sykes
That’s the question. I honestly don’t know whether it’s impenetrable, but it hasn’t been penetrated so far, and I don’t see any sign of cracks to it. This is the problem with an alternative reality silo that really does completely shape scenarios. If you’ve been watching over the last seven days, the conservative media is presenting an entirely different universe of facts and narratives than you would get anywhere else.

It is two different worlds right now.

Sean Illing
What does the conservative world look like right now amid all the news about the Mueller investigation? What are they selling?

Charlie Sykes
It’s what I’d call whataboutism on steroids. The narrative is that the Russia investigation is not only a hoax, but that the real story is Hillary Clinton and that we ought to be going back to Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Fusion GPS and Hillary Clinton’s alleged non-scandal with Uranium One.

These were the tactics used to great effect during the campaign: Trump would face an allegation and deflect it by turning it back on his opponent. That appears to be the playbook right now, and the conservative media is happily complicit in this.

No matter what happens with Trump, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against him, it’s always, “What about Hillary?” or, “What about the liberals?” or, “What about the Dems?” They treat this like a battlefield, and it’s always about defending their side no matter what.

Sean Illing
Is it about getting people to believe things that aren’t true, or is it about overwhelming the conversation with bullshit in order to distract from what’s actually happening?

Charlie Sykes
That’s a really good question. The essence of propaganda is not necessarily to convince you of a certain set of facts. It is to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It’s to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth. The conservative media is a giant fog machine designed to confuse and disorient people.

Which, from Trump’s point of view, is a win.

Sean Illing
To borrow a question from John Oliver, does anything matter anymore?

Charlie Sykes
I don’t know. This is what a post-truth culture looks like. This is what post-factual politics mean. I think we’re coming to grips with the full implications of that. Now, having said that, we are moving into the realm of the legal process, which does take facts more seriously, which does take lies more seriously. And you wonder whether that’s going to start sowing doubts.

To think that it will, however, is to bet against everything we’ve seen so far.

“CONSERVATIVE MEDIA HAS CHANGED THE NATURE OF CONSERVATISM”
Why conservatives are so good at peddling alternate realities
Sean Illing
But it seems like the echo chamber is airtight, no?

Charlie Sykes
I was thinking about why it’s so effective. Part of it is that the conservative media has done a really great job of convincing conservatives that they’re under siege, and that they’re victims and that there’s this effort to bring down their guy. So the resistance is so strong to anything that poses a threat. It’s not just a set of facts. It’s an emotional reaction to these kinds of stories.

I’m sure you watched the way Monday morning played out. How incredibly fast the spin went out that the Manafort indictment was not about Trump, not about the collusion, that it was a complete nothingburger that had nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.

And that lasted for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, until the next shoe drops. Then there was the Papadopoulos thing. But it seemed like there was no period in which they were rocked back on their heels by the fact that we actually have indictments of some major players in Trumpworld.

It’s like it never happened in the conservative world.

Sean Illing
In the safe space that is conservative media, it kind of didn’t happen, right?

Charlie Sykes
Many Trump voters get virtually all of their information from inside the bubble. I mean, there was a time when you would get the conservative point of view, but it was a counterpoint to what you heard elsewhere. Now the conservative media has become a safe space for people who want to be told that they don’t have to believe anything that’s uncomfortable or negative. A safe space where they’re convinced that Hillary Clinton is the real criminal, that the Clinton scandals are what we really ought to be following.

What’s remarkable, and what I’ve never seen before, is the way that Trump sends out the dog-whistle signals to the media, which picks up themes with almost Pavlovian enthusiasm. He’ll tweet out, “The real scandal is Hillary,” and suddenly you’ll see it explode across conservative media, starting with Fox News, but other outlets as well.

I mean, when is the last time you saw a president with that kind of an ability to shape and deflect criticism?

Sean Illing
I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like this. But I want to linger on a point you just made, which is really important. The persecution mania on the right, the victim mentality that conservative media preaches, has engineered a base that is primed to dismiss uncomfortable facts as attacks on their identity. This is something that has been happening long before Trump entered the arena, but it seems like Trump is only possible because of this conditioning.

Charlie Sykes
That’s absolutely right. And again, that suggests that a lot of this is very emotional. It’s a visceral resistance. It’s a visceral loyalty. Mere facts have a hard time penetrating something like that, because it’s an attack on a member of your tribe. It’s an attack on a member of your family.

The details are less important than the fact that you’re being persecuted, you’re being victimized by people that you loathe and fear.

“THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA IS PRESENTING AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT UNIVERSE OF FACTS AND NARRATIVES”
How conservative media changed conservatism
Sean Illing
I’m not a conservative, and anyone who follows my work knows that. And I readily admit that there are partisan media outlets on the left as well. But I still find myself wondering why conservatives have an easier time constructing and spreading fantasy narratives. Do you think it has something to do with the conservatism itself, or is it something else entirely?

Charlie Sykes
It’s an interesting question. I have to say that this does feel new in some degree. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, there really was not much of a conservative media. That was before almost all the modern conservative media infrastructure. There was no Fox News when Reagan was president. There was no Breitbart.com, and yet a lot of conservatives think that was the golden age of conservatism without the media.

Sean Illing
So what happened?

Charlie Sykes
Conservative media has changed the nature of conservatism. It’s changed the thought leadership rather dramatically. But going back to your points, as we’re getting a little bit deeper here, there is that paranoid string, there’s a paranoid thread that’s run through politics, including conservative politics, for a very, very long time.

I think you saw the weaponization of that in 2016.

Sean Illing
You say conservative media has changed conservatism. Has it killed it?

Charlie Sykes
That’s certainly possible. I mean, look where we are right now. What is conservatism right now other than anti-liberalism? People like Rush Limbaugh have essentially acknowledged that. He used to call his show “The Limbaugh Institute for Conservatism” and now it’s “The Limbaugh Institute for Anti-Leftism” — or something like that.

I’m not sure we can identity what’s left of conservatism other than a hatred for leftism.

Sean Illing
I still wonder why the liberal media hasn’t had an equivalent effect on the left. Any theories?

Charlie Sykes
I think the left has had less success in hermetically sealing off their base from other sources of information — that’s a major factor.

And look, this is deeply unfashionable for me to say as a conservative, but I think the education gap is not irrelevant. I used the term Vichy Republican the other day to describe Republicans who are basically collaborators, and I was a little taken aback by the number of people who had no idea what I was talking about.

Sean Illing
David Frum had a great line a while back. I may be butchering it a bit, but it was something to the effect of, “We thought Fox News worked for us, but it turned out that we worked for Fox News.”

I took that to mean that Fox has redefined conservatism by redefining what the base pays attention to, what it cares about. Consequently, you have Republican politicians who now reflect those changes in the base.

Charlie Sykes
That’s exactly right. Frum has another line about that. He said something like, “Republicans have a crisis of followership.” The Republican leadership in Congress sees all of this. They’re horrified by it. But they’re not willing to do anything about it because their base won’t allow it.

Sean Illing
Let’s wrap this up by circling back to the Mueller story. How do you see this playing out in the coming weeks and months in conservative media?

Charlie Sykes
I think this is going to be a test of the strength of that bubble, and we’re going to see how far the conservative media is going to go in providing that kind of air cover to Donald Trump. I wish I could say I was optimistic, but based on past experience, I’m not.

And by the way, most of the conservative media will justify their support for Trump on the basis of conservative issues. They’ll say, We’re backing him because of the judges, or because of tax cuts. But what you’re going to see is that they’re going to support and rationalize the corruption that has nothing to do with any of those conservative values or ideas.

I think the next several months will go a long way in defining conservatism.

2319

The mother of two who flipped off Trump has been fired by her employers.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/woman-flips-off-donald-trump-fired_us_59fe0ab4e4b0c9652fffa484

2320

Free Speech me bollix.

2321

They caught her on the basis of having the photo as her facebook picture. Cunts.

2322

It was deeply offensive, she deserved to lose her job.

2323

It’s dangerous to take on public figures on social media.

2324

People need to realise that there are consequences to their posts on social media.

1 Like
2325

That would never happen in ireland

2326

The thick micks probably never heard of Facebook. You have to remember Ireland is 30 years behind the rest of the world.

1 Like
2327

There is no free speech protection in the workplace in the US, unless perhaps for govt employees. Most states are at will employment so you can quit or be fired for effectively any reason.

2328

She wasn’t in the workplace.

2329

Doesn’t matter. You can be fired for any reason as long as no discrimination laws are broken. It’s getting quite common here for people to get fired (or not hired) for stuff posted on social media.

2330

It depends on the companies social media policy thoigh as well
I can see this chick hopefully getting millions in a pay out.